Our Time in the iPhone

In my view, the one product that best captures and symbolises the age we are in is the iPhone. For sure is a brilliant little product but I see it as something that excapsulates so well so much of the breathtaking difference as decade or so makes in our lifestyles.

Less than 10 years ago, photographs are taken with cameras and printed on paper - not any longer!
Less than 10 years ago music is something on a CD or a tape - not any longer!
Less than 10 years ago a cell phone is for voice only - not any longer! (And less than 20 years ago, there was hardly ANY cell phone at all!)
Less than 15 years ago, hardly anyone had an email - not any longer!
Less than 15 years ago, people have just discovered using the HTML and linking different documents together with "links" you can click on ... the internet was an exotic realm limited to research institutes - not any longer!
Less than 10 years ago, the dot-com boom went bust and people were declaring the party to be over and the internet is dead - not any longer!
Less than 10 years ago, international phone calls were extremely expensive - not any longer ! Moreover you can do that now for free and with streaming video from anywhere!
Less than 10 years ago, people still buy encyclopedia in the book form - not any longer!
Less than 5 years ago, people were surprised to find little cameras on their cellphones - not any longer!
Less than 5 years ago, to open a page on the internet you needed to w.a.i.t. for it to load - not any longer!
Less than 10 years ago, Google was newly founded (in 1998)
Less than 5 years ago, you can only access the internet on a computer...and always with a wire - not any longer!
Less than 5 years ago, broadband was unusual and costs a lot - not any longer!
Less than 5 years ago, WiFi were rare and exotic - not any longer!
Less than 5 years ago, the idea of watching endless choice of smooth-streaming video online was far-fetched - not any longer!
Less than 2 years ago, one cannot carry around their entire digital library (of creation, documents, photos, music...) on a sliver of silicon the size of their finger nail - not any longer!
Less than 2 years ago, you won't expect your auntie to invite you to be their friend on Facebook - not any longer!

The list can go on but physically the iPhone is nothing more than a piece of glass, pieces of circuitry on silicon and plastic, a battery and a think metal back. Thoughout most of human history, it is not something that would have worth much at all.

Its magic and power lies in the unseen and the intangible. This is the sign of our times that its power came from the power of thought and intellectual energy that made up the software and its value lay in the connection of thought that it opened up; by linking up the collective knowledge and the energies of human creativity. The value of the device is no longer in the physical, it is all intellectual - unseen, intangible, everywhere and nowhere in particular.

Once we consider how our entire collection of photographs, music and recorded knowledge can disappear into the gigabits of memory that appear to be little more than dust and ether; one is reminded that ultimately the universe is only energy - even mass is a energy according to Einstein and quantum physics - "everything" is just but a thought, a pool of energy, both-existing-and-non-existent, limitless, transforming, transient, abundant, all-powerful and all-present.

If we consider how the device came about, I can see vast chains that stretch across the world and across time only to meet at certain points in time and space.

On the most tangible level, I see the global supply chain of the millenium decade. Into mega production bases in Southern China came product designs streamed from Apple in California. In came microchips from the US, Korea and Taiwan. Countless other materials were sourced from all over China and the rest of East Asia. In came software codes written by brilliants minds drawn from California, India, Japan, Russia and any number of other places in the world. In China, all those ingredients met young workers from Sichuan, Guangdong and Zhejiang who assembled them iPhones and loaded them into containers in Hong Kong ... or into FedEx aircrafts that swarm like bats across the oceans and land only in the middle of the night. Along the way, they were read by hundreds of lasers as they move from containers to bins to boxes and all the way to the shelves in a thousand cities in the world.

There, another thousands of paths converge - those leading back to the people who turned a thingy into a product (marketing), the technical support team in India, journalists who wrote the reviews in the magazines, the youngsters who man the stores, the guys who designed the theme music for the advertisement campaigns, the girl whose art work adorned the store display, the thousands of programmers who hoped to strike it rich creating online applications, the corporate boardrooms who demanded an iPhone "platform" for their services, the technicians who upgraded supplied the cellphone network and finally the consumer - who would in time blogged about her new iPhone to her friends on facebook.

Out of a network, a chain and out of a chain and into another network, and then another. It is globalization in action both the actor as well as the result.

On another level that if often unseen, the risks of all such ventures were financed, underwritten, exchanged, insured, collaterialised, packaged-and-sold-on by bankers in New York and London. We can see the lawyer who decided to add another punctuation mark on the intellectual property agreement. On one side of the world, a trader executed a trade for AAPL and covering it with an option; and on the otherside of the globe a retirement fund manager attended a Macworld event sitting next to a hedge fund manager and next to a venture capitalist all thinking different thoughts but all linked to how what Steve Jobs was about to show will do to the money under their control.

But that is before we got to the power of the device itself. In its innards, we see the cumulative knowledge of generations of scientific genii and pioneers all the way from the beginning of science in ancient Greece, to medieval engineers in China, mathematicians in India and Persia, ancient mechanical designers in Rome and Egypt. We see them through the foundations of modern science that stretched from France, Geneva, Florence, Vienna, London during the Enlightenment, and all the way to the labs of MIT, Cambridge, Stanford and Caltech where their brilliant decendants - whether they come from America, Russia, Europe and Asia create breakthroughs and spilled out into their garages and start-ups in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

And in its memories - those same dust and ether that store information - we see the cumulative creative energies from time immemorial that live on in ideas, in our music, in the written and spoken word, in images, in art and design, in all the richness of the creative arts and in all the richess of life that populate the human civilization - so long as anything can be digitised.

And that is how, I see our time in the simple little iPhone.